Apparently Indian scientists have developed a possible vaccine for the Zika virus, the vaccine now being put into clinical trial.

I knwo this probably should belong in Health, but I wanted to ask yall if you consider Zika to be this year's Ebola in terms of government response, public fear, countries affected, etc

I have actually educated myself on this virus by listening to the alex jones radio show. The virus was put there by the government so they could justify giving everyone a vaccine that actually sterilizes them. You're welcome.

Apparently Indian scientists have developed a possible vaccine for the Zika virus, the vaccine now being put into clinical trial.

I knwo this probably should belong in Health, but I wanted to ask yall if you consider Zika to be this year's Ebola in terms of government response, public fear, countries affected, etc

I have actually educated myself on this virus by listening to the alex jones radio show. The virus was put there by the government so they could justify giving everyone a vaccine that actually sterilizes them. You're welcome.

To be honest with you, I still have no idea how this virus even causes microcephaly. I don't know what the base probability of contracting it is, but, of those who do, only around 1/4 experience any symptoms, and, even then, it's usually fairly mild. Nothing like the anomalous neurodevelopment that people that people are getting so freaked out about. I don't even know what proportion of children born to Zika-infected mothers come out with malformed heads. As far as I know, the correlation is supposedly fairly tight (which is why people generally agree that Zika is to blame), but nobody knows what the mechanism is. I haven't even heard any plausible guesses.

Weirder still is that several strains of this virus were sequenced in the mid-2000s, and periodically afterward. Turns out, today's Zika has basically changed not at all. It's about 10,000 bases long, which I've been told is pretty tiny for a virus, and, if you compare the map from then to the several maps now, the largest variation is <20 bases. No strings of data large enough (to the best of my meager knowledge) to cause any catastrophe. So, despite the fact that the virus hasn't undergone a single significant mutation in the last decade, there is all of a sudden a rash of developmental damage, not in healthy adults, but in unborn children who, for whatever reason, aren't protected from this madness by their warm placenta marinade.

And there's no reason to believe the entire population would suddenly and generally become specifically cripplingly vulnerable, especially to a mosquito-borne disease in a country where they engineered mosquitoes exclusively to breed mass sterility into the insects' population.

At 2/7/2016 11:52:42 PM, Cody_Franklin wrote:And there's no reason to believe the entire population would suddenly and generally become specifically cripplingly vulnerable, especially to a mosquito-borne disease in a country where they engineered mosquitoes exclusively to breed mass sterility into the insects' population.

Yeah, first world countries have little to fear from mosquito born illnesses. I would hope that, once people actually started dying, our government would stop listening to the anti-GMO Luddites and actually put that sterilization project into action. It really was a brilliant piece of work on Oxitec's part.

At 2/7/2016 11:52:42 PM, Cody_Franklin wrote:And there's no reason to believe the entire population would suddenly and generally become specifically cripplingly vulnerable, especially to a mosquito-borne disease in a country where they engineered mosquitoes exclusively to breed mass sterility into the insects' population.

Yeah, first world countries have little to fear from mosquito born illnesses. I would hope that, once people actually started dying, our government would stop listening to the anti-GMO Luddites and actually put that sterilization project into action. It really was a brilliant piece of work on Oxitec's part.

I'm not even talking about less developed countries (for which I agree this whole business is more or less a non-issue): I mean that I don't understand how it's possible. given that a) the virus has not mutated, b) it's unlikely that unborn children would spontaneously develop a widespread vulnerability to infection in a population with a small infection rate and smaller symptom presentation rate (I also have no idea, given the overwhelmingly asymptomatic character of the disease, whether the total number of cases of the virus has increased alongside the observed correlation between maternal infection and microcephaly--if the rate of infection hasn't changed, or has increased only insignificantly, I'm further confused why it took a decade (counting from 2006, which is the most recent pre-mosquito sequencing of Zika) for the virus to suddenly become a problem--there would almost certainly had to have been some other catalyst, since, if microcephaly is an intrinsic result of infection, it either would have happened sooner or something was insulating unborn children against the effects and is no longer doing so), and c) after the release of the engineered mosquitoes in the early teens, the target population killed something like nine out of every ten mosquitoes, which you would ordinarily infer decreases the risk of transmission.

At 2/7/2016 11:52:42 PM, Cody_Franklin wrote:And there's no reason to believe the entire population would suddenly and generally become specifically cripplingly vulnerable, especially to a mosquito-borne disease in a country where they engineered mosquitoes exclusively to breed mass sterility into the insects' population.

Yeah, first world countries have little to fear from mosquito born illnesses. I would hope that, once people actually started dying, our government would stop listening to the anti-GMO Luddites and actually put that sterilization project into action. It really was a brilliant piece of work on Oxitec's part.

I'm not even talking about less developed countries (for which I agree this whole business is more or less a non-issue): I mean that I don't understand how it's possible. given that a) the virus has not mutated, b) it's unlikely that unborn children would spontaneously develop a widespread vulnerability to infection in a population with a small infection rate and smaller symptom presentation rate (I also have no idea, given the overwhelmingly asymptomatic character of the disease, whether the total number of cases of the virus has increased alongside the observed correlation between maternal infection and microcephaly--if the rate of infection hasn't changed, or has increased only insignificantly, I'm further confused why it took a decade (counting from 2006, which is the most recent pre-mosquito sequencing of Zika) for the virus to suddenly become a problem--there would almost certainly had to have been some other catalyst, since, if microcephaly is an intrinsic result of infection, it either would have happened sooner or something was insulating unborn children against the effects and is no longer doing so), and c) after the release of the engineered mosquitoes in the early teens, the target population killed something like nine out of every ten mosquitoes, which you would ordinarily infer decreases the risk of transmission.

Stranger and stranger.

I think it mostly has to do with the range of the mosquito which acts as a human vector expanding its range as the virus moved. It was previously an enzootic virus with incredibly rare outbreaks. But then a certain mosquito species began transferring it to humans, and it jumped from the Old World to the New World, where Aedes aegypti is very widespread all around the Caribbean, and in South America. So it quickly reached epidemic proportions this last year, while before that it was quietly island-hopping its way across the Pacific.

As to the issue with babies, they've found the virus in amniotic fluid, so it definitely got past the placenta. The body must be using larger antibodies, which cannot pass the placenta, to fight off the infection (if there is a causal relationship here). When you have a virus that can pass, and an antibody which cannot, you have a recipe for disaster, because the mother will be able to pass the disease to the fetus but will be powerless to help it fight the virus off.

I also looked up the incidence of microcephaly, and it's at 1% of newborns in the worst areas of Brazil. So it's not anything that would cause panic, just something which would eventually present as a pattern worthy of study. As far as I know, the conclusive research isn't even in yet. And the Brazilian mosquito program is in its pilot phase now in limited areas; it hasn't really swung into full effect. I probably won't be used en masse either; things like that are typically used as a targeted response to outbreaks, or as a strategic preemptive measure. I know that they tried to use them in the Keys, but a bunch of people with overactive imaginations completely freaked out and got the plug pulled on the operation because they'd been watching too much Spiderman.